For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Question

by R. S. Fraser January 3 1955

Reprinted from SWP Discussion Bulletin A-30, August 1955

1. Nationalism and the Negro Struggle

For a number of months both Comrade Breitman and myself have been
working toward the opening of this discussion of the Negro question. Both, I
believe, with the hope that we could enter it on common ground. But it is
obvious that we cannot: we have a difference upon the fundamental question of
the relationship between the Negro struggle in the United States and the
struggle of oppressed nations, that is, the national question.

I cannot challenge Comrade Breitmans authority to represent
the tradition of the past period, for he has been the spokesman for the party
on this question for most of the past fifteen years.

On the other hand I am opposed to the nationalist conception of
the Negro question which is contained not only in Comrade Breitmans
article, On the Negro Struggle, etc. (September 1954), but is
implicit in the resolution on the Negro question of the 1948 Convention.

The Negro question in the U.S. was first introduced into the
radical movement as a subject worthy of special consideration during the early
years of the Communist International. But it was introduced as an appendage to
the colonial and national questions of Europe and Asia.

This is not its proper place. For the Negro question, while
bearing the superficial similarity to the colonial and national questions is
fundamentally different and requires an independent treatment. In the early
congresses of the Communist International, American delegates presented points
of view on the Negro question. Their speeches reveal the beginning of an
attempt to differentiate this question from the main subject matter of the
colonial and national questions.

This beginning did not realize any clear demarcation between these
questions, and the Comintern in degeneration went backward in this as in all
other respects. Under Stalin the subordination of the American Negro question
to the national and colonial questions was crystallized.

It is the historical task of Trotskyism to tear the Negro question
in the United States away from the national question and to establish it as an
independent political problem, that it may be judged on its own merits, and its
laws of development discovered.

This process was begun by the founding leaders of American
Trotskyism as expressed in the position defended by Swabeck in 1933 in his
discussions with Trotsky. It is this tradition which I defend rather than that
expressed by Comrade Breitman.

2. The Question of Nationalism

The modern nation is exclusively a product of capitalism. It arose
in Europe out of the atomization and dispersal of the productive forces which
characterized feudalism.

Nations began to emerge with the growth of trade and formed the
framework for the production and distribution of commodities on a capitalist
basis.

Nationalism has a contradictory historical development in Europe.
Trotsky elaborated this difference as the key to understanding the role of the
national question in the Russian revolution. In the first place the nations of
western Europe emerged in the unification of petty states around a commercial
center. The problem of the bourgeois revolution was to achieve this national
unification.

In eastern Europe, Russian nationalism appeared on the scene in
the role of the oppressor of many small nations. The problem of national
unification in the Russian revolution was the breakup of this oppressive system
and to achieve the independence of the small nations.

These were the two basic expressions of the national question in
Europe. But these two basic phases of national development, corresponding to
different stages in the development of capitalism, each contain a multiplicity
of forms and combinations of the two phases [as is] not uncommon.

The national question of Europe reveals problems such as the
Scotch rebellions, wherein a nation never emerged; Holland in its revolutionary
war against Spain; the peculiarity of the unification of Germany; the rise and
breakup of the Austro-Hungarian empire; the revolutionary transformation of the
Czarist empire into the USSR; and the many contradictory expressions of
national consciousness which were revealed in the October revolution; and
lastly, the peculiar phenomenon of the Jews: a nation without a territory.

But even these do not exhaust the national question, for it
appears as one of the fundamental problems of the whole colonial revolution,
and all the problems of national unification, and national independence,
dispersal and unification, of the centrifugal and centripetal forces unleashed
by the national questions, reappear in new and different forms.

And we have by no means seen everything. The African struggle, as
it assumes its mature form will show us another fascinating and unique
expression of the national struggle.

What constitutes the basis for nationalism? A people united by a
system of commodity exchange, a language and culture expressing the needs of
commodity exchange, a territory to contain these elements: all these are
elements of nationalism. Which is fundamental to the concept of the nation?

Language is important but not decisive: the Ukraine was so
Russified and the Ukrainian language so close to extinction that Luxemburg
could refer contemptuously to it as a novelty of the intelligentsia. Yet this
did not prevent Ukrainian nationalism, when awakened by the Bolsheviks, to play
a decisive role in the Russian revolution, alongside the other nationalities.

It would be convenient to be able to fasten upon geography as a
fundamental to nationalism: a common territory where in relative isolation a
nation could develop. This has, indeed, been the condition for the existence of
nations generally; still it would not satisfy the Jewish nation which existed
for centuries without a territory.

The one quality which is common to all and cannot be dispensed
with in consideration of any and all of the nations of Europe, of the colonial
world--the one indispensable quality which they all possess, and without which
none could exist; including the old nations and the new ones, the large and
small, the advanced and the backward, the classical and the
exceptional--is the quality of their relation to a system of commodity
production and circulation: its capacity to serve as a unit of commodity
exchange.

National oppression arises fundamentally out of the suppression of
the right of a commodity to fulfil its normal economic function in the process
of technological development and to produce and circulate commodities according
to the normal laws of capitalist production.

This is at the foundation of the national oppression of every
nation in Europe and the colonial world. This is the groundwork out of which
national aspirations develop and from which national revolutions emerge. It is
this fundamental economic relation of a people to the forces of production
which creates the national question and determines the laws of motion of the
national struggle. This is just as true of the cases of obscure nationalities
who only achieved national consciousness after the October revolution as it was
for the Netherlands, or France, or for Poland.

Comrade Breitman is thoughtful not to put words into my mouth. But
I wish he were equally thoughtful in not attributing to me ideas which I think
he has had every opportunity to know that I do not hold. For when he contends
that I am thinking only of the classical examples of the national question,
when I deny that the Negro question is a national question, he is very wrong.

The Negro question is not a national question because it lacks the
fundamental groundwork for the development of nationalism; an independent
system of commodity exchange, or to be more precise, a mode of life which would
make possible the emergence of such a system.

This differentiates the Negro question from the most obscure of
all the European national questions, for at the root of each and every one of
them is to be found this fundamental relation to the productive forces.

The Negro question is a racial question: a matter of
discrimination because of skin color, and thats all.

Because of the fundamental economic problem which was inherent
among the oppressed nations of eastern Europe, Lenin foresaw the revolutionary
significance of the idea of the right of self-determination.

He applied this to the national question and to it alone. Women
are a doubly exploited group in all society. But Lenin never applied the slogan
of self-determination to the woman question. It would not make sense. And it
doesnt make very much more sense when applied to the Negro question.

It would if the Negroes were a nation. Or the embryo of a
nation within a nation or a precapitalist people living in an
isolated territory which might become the framework for a national system of
commodity exchange and capitalist production. Negroes, however, are not victims
of national oppression but of racial discrimination. The right of
self-determination is not the question which is at stake in their struggle.
It is, however, fundamental to the national struggle.

Despite his protestation to the contrary, Comrade Breitman holds
to a basically nationalist conception of the Negro struggle.

This is contrary to the fundamental course of the Negro struggle
and a vital danger to the party. Comrade Breitmans conception of the
unique quality of the Negro movement is explained by him on page 9. In
comparison to the nationalist movements of Europe, Asia and Africa he says,
Fraser sees one similarity end many differences between them; we see many
similarities and one big difference.

Of what does this one big difference consist? According to Comrade
Breitman, the only difference between the movement of the Polish nationalists
under Czarism and the American Negro today is that the Negro movement
thus far aims solely at acquiring enough force and momentum to break down
the barriers that exclude Negroes from American society, showing few signs of
aiming at national separatism.

Therefore, the only difference between the Poles and the Negroes
is one of consciousness. But this proposition makes a theoretical shambles not
only of the Negro question but of the national question too. According to this
analysis, any especially oppressed group which expressed group solidarity is
automatically a nation. Or an embryo of a nation. Or an embryo of a nation
within a nation. This would apply equally to the women throughout the world and
the untouchables of the caste system of India.

If we must ignore the fundamental economic differences in the
oppression of the Polish nation and the Negro people, and conclude that the
only difference between them is one of consciousness, then we have not only
discarded Lenins and Trotskys theses on the national question, but
we have completely departed from the materialist conception of history.

It is one thing for Trotsky to say that the fact that there are no
cultural barriers between the Negro people and the rest of the residents of the
U.S. would not be decisive if the Negroes should actually develop a movement of
a separatist nature. But it is an altogether different matter for Breitman to
assume that the fundamental economic and cultural conditions which form the
groundwork of nationalism have no significance whatever in the consideration of
the Negro es as a nation.

The basic error in Negro nationalism in the U.S. is the failure to
deal with the material foundation of nationalism in general. This results in
the conception that nationalism is only a matter of consciousness without
material foundation. The other subordinate arguments which buttress the
nationalism conception of the Negro question clearly demonstrate this error.

3. The Negro Struggle and the Russian Revolution

Comrade Breitmans point of view is most clearly revealed in
the section of his article entitled What Can Change Present Trends?

He proposes that we consider seriously the variant that upon being
awakened by the beginning of the proletarian revolution the Negroes will
develop a new consciousness which will (or may) impel them along the path of a
separatist struggle. He uses Trotsky as his authority both in his specific
reference to this possibility in the published conversations of 1939 and also
by reference to Trotskys treatment of the problem of nationalities in the
third volume of the History of the Russian Revolution.

The thesis of this trend of thought is as follows: In the Russian
revolution a large number of important oppressed minorities were either so
oppressed or so culturally backward that they had no national consciousness.
Among some, the process of forced assimilation into the Great Russian imperial
orbit was so overwhelming that it was inconceivable to them that they might
aspire to be anything but servants of the Great Russian bureaucracy until the
revolution opened their eyes to the possibility of self-determination.

Other minorities, such as the Ukrainians and many of the eastern
nations, had been overcome by the Great Russians while they were a
pre-capitalist tribal community. They never had become nations. History never
afforded them the opportunity to develop a system of commodity production and
distribution of their own. Because of the uneven tempo of capitalist
development in eastern Europe they were prematurely swept into the
entanglements of Russian imperialism before either the production, the
consciousness, or the apparatus of nationalism could develop.

Nevertheless, national self-determination was a fundamental
condition of their liberation. In some cases this new-found national
consciousness took form in the early stages of the revolution. But in others,
it was so submerged by the national chauvinism of Great Russia that it was only
after the revolution that a genuine nationalism asserted itself.

It is to these nations that we are referred by Comrade Breitman as
a historical justification for his conception of the Negro question.

Comrade Breitman says, in effect: There is a sufficient element of
identity between these peoples and the Negroes to warrant our using them as
examples of what the direction of motion of the Negro struggle might be under
revolutionary conditions.

Of course, if we are even to discuss such a possibility we would
have to leave aside the fundamental difference between the American Negroes and
these nations; that is, the relations of these peoples to the production and
distribution of commodities, the type of cultural development which this
function reflected, and the geographical homeland which they occupied.

Leaving aside these, we have the question of consciousness again.
But in this respect, the Negroes have just as different a problem and history
from these peoples as they have in every other respect.

We are dealing principally with those nationalities in the Czarist
Empire to whom national consciousness came late. The characteristic of this
group was that before the Russian revolution they had had little opportunity
for unified struggle, and hence no means of arriving at a fundamental political
tendency. That is why their desire for self-determination did not manifest
itself in the pre-revolutionary period. In order to find out the ultimate goals
for which they are struggling, an oppressed people must first go through a
series of elementary struggles. After that they are in a position to go to
another stage in which it is possible, under favorable conditions, for them to
discover the historic road which truly corresponds to their economic,
political, and social development and their relation to the rest of society. In
this way the consciousness of the most oppressed nationalities of Czarism
seemed to all but the Bolsheviks to be the consciousness of the dominant
nation: Great Russia.

How badly they were mistaken was proved in the October revolution
and afterward when each one of the suppressed tribes and nations of the Czarist
Empire, under the stimulus of Lenins program for self-determination for
the oppressed minorities, found at last a national consciousness.

We are asked to adopt this perspective (or to leave the door
open for it) for the Negroes in the U.S. The best that can be said for
this request is that it would be unwise for us to grant it, as it is based upon
superficial reasoning. The Negro movement in the United States is one of the
oldest, most continuous and most experienced movements in the entire arena of
the class struggle of the world.

What labor movement has even an episodic history before 1848?
Practically, only the British. The American labor movement had no real
beginning until after the Civil War. The history of a movement can be somewhat
measured in the leaders which it produces. Who among us remembers an important
American labor leader before William A. Sylvis? But we easily recall Vesey,
Turner, Tubman and Douglass.

There were, of course, labor struggles during the pre-Civil War
period. But they were dwarfed in importance beside the anti-slavery struggle,
because the national question for the American people had not yet been solved.
The revolution against Great Britain had established the independence of the
U.S., but had produced a regime of dual power between the slave owners and
capitalists, with the slave owners politically ascendant.

The whole future of the working class depended, not so much upon
organizational achievements against the capitalists, as upon the solution to
the question of the slave power ruling the land.

This is the fundamental reason for the belated character of the
development of the stable labor movement in the U.S.

Immediately after the question of the slave power was settled, the
modern labor movement arose. Although it required a little experience before it
could settle upon stable forms, in a rapid succession, the National Labor
Union, the Knights of Labor, the AF of L, the IWW arose. All powerful national
labor organizations. It was only 20 years after the Civil War that the AF of L
was founded.

It has been different for the Negro movement which has been in
almost continuous existence as a genuine movement of national scope, definite
objectives, and at many times embracing tremendous masses, since the days of
the Nat Turner rebellion. Even before this turning point in the Negro struggle,
heroes and episodes are neither few nor far between. The Negro people are the
most highly organized section of the population of the country. They have had
an infinite variety of experience in struggle, and are extremely conscious of
their goals. These are not goals which have been prescribed for them by the
ruling class, but on the contrary, the very opposite of everything the ruling
class has tried to enforce. They are moreover the most politically advanced
section of American society.

How in the name of common sense, much less of dialectical logic,
can you propose that we seriously compare the Negroes to the oppressed tribes
and obscure peasant nations of Czarist Russia, who never had ten years of
continuous struggle, as compared with the centuries of continuous Negro
struggle? Peoples who never had an opportunity to find out whether or not they
had a basis for nationalism because of the overwhelming force of Great Russian
assimilation, compared to the Negroes who have been given every opportunity to
discover a basis for nationalism, precisely in forced segregation?

There are a number of historical reasons why the Negroes have
never adopted a nationalist perspective, and why the normal mode of struggle
for them has been anti-separatist.

But first it should be understood that it is in keeping with the
nature of the Negro movement to regard its history as continuous from the days
of slavery. The Negro question appeared upon the scene as a class question: The
Negroes were slaves. But alongside of this grew the race question: All slaves
were Negroes and the slave was designated as inferior and subhuman. This was
the origin of the Negro question.

The abolition of slavery destroyed the property relations of the
chattel slave system. But the plantation system survived, fitting the social
relations of slavery to capitalist property relations.

Because of these unsolved problems left over from the second
American revolution, the Negroes still struggle against the social relations
which were in effect a hundred and fifty and more years ago.

The modern Negro movement dates roughly from the era of the cotton
gin--approximately 1800. The first answer of the Negroes to the intensification
of labor brought on by the extension of the cotton acreage was a series of
local and regional revolts.

The slaves learned in these struggles that the slave owners were
not merely individual lords of the cotton, but were also enthroned on the high
seats of the nations political capital. They had all the laws, police
forces, and the armed might of the country at their disposal.

At the same time the Northern capitalists began to feel the
domination of the slave power to be too restricting upon their enterprises. The
farmers began to feel the pressure of slave labor and the plantation system.
These three social forces, the slaves, and the capitalists and the farmers, had
in their hands the key to the whole future of the United States as a nation.

Thus the Negroes were thrust into the center of a great national
struggle against the slave power. This was the only road by which any assurance
of victory was possible.

Because of their position as the most exploited section of the
population, each succeeding vital movement of the masses has found the Negroes
in a central and advanced position in great interracial struggles against
capitalist exploitation. This was true in the Reconstruction, the Radical
Populist movement of the South, and finally in the modern labor movement.

4. Negro Culture and Nationalism

The factor of segregation has had the effect of providing one of
the potential elements of nationalism. The segregated life of Negro slaves
produced a Negro culture a hundred years ago. But language, custom, ideology
and culture generally do not have an inherent logic of development. They
express the socio-economic forces which bring them into being.

In the examination of Negro culture we are forced to examine first
the course of development of Negro life in general. The decisive factor in the
development of Negro life during the past century derived from their class
position in the Civil War. In the position of that class whose liberation was
at stake, as the U.S. confronted slavery, the Negroes were thrust into a
central and commanding position in the struggle against the slave power which
culminated in the Civil War and Reconstruction.

It was the slaves who built abolitionism, gave it ideological
leadership, and a mass body of support. It was their actions which broke up the
class peace between the privileged classes of the North and South. It was their
policy which won the Civil War.

These factors expressed the breaking out of the Negro question
from the confining limits of a narrow, provincial, local or regional question
into the arena of the great national struggles of the American people. The
Negroes culture shared the same fate as did their political economy.

Instead of turning further inward upon itself until a completely
new and independent language and culture would emerge, the Negro culture
assimilated with the national and became the greatest single factor in
modifying the basic Anglo-Saxon culture of the United States.

These are expressions of the historical law of mutual
assimilation between Negro and white in the United States. The social
custom and political edict of segregation expresses race relations in this
country. Forced assimilation is the essential expression of national relations
in eastern Europe. Mutual assimilation, in defiance of segregation expresses
the Negro struggle, just as profoundly as the will to self-determination
expresses the struggle of the oppressed nations of eastern Europe.

It appears that the matter of Negro national consciousness, which
may occur as the result of the revolution, is for Comrade Breitman an entirely
mystical property. It is devoid of any basis in either political economy,
culture or history and can be proven only by identifying the Negroes with the
non-classical nationalities of Czarist Russia who were too
backward, too oppressed, too illiterate and primitive, too lacking in
consciousness, too unaccustomed to unified struggle to be able to realize that
they were embryonic nations.

5. The Secondary Laws of Motion of the Negro Struggle

As should be plain by now, I am not so interested in closing
the door on self-determination as I am in showing that the Negro struggle
is not within the orbit of the national struggle and that it is, therefore, not
the question of self-determination which is at stake.

The Negro people in the U.S. have established their fundamental
goals without assistance. These goals were dictated to them by their peculiar
position in society as the objects of the racial system in its only pure form.

The goals which history has dictated to them are to achieve
complete equality through the elimination of racial segregation,
discrimination, and prejudice. That is, the overthrow of the race system. It is
from these historically conditioned conclusions that the Negro struggle,
whatever its forms, has taken the path of the struggle for direct assimilation.
All that we can add to this is that these goals cannot be accomplished except
through the socialist revolution.

But there are circumstances under which this movement is forced to
take a different turn. In this connection it is quite clear that Comrade
Breitman completely misunderstands my attitude. When he says that I would
consider a separatist type of development of the Negro struggle to be a
calamity, he puts the cart before the horse in the rather important matter of
the relation between cause and effect.

Negro separatism would not of itself be a catastrophe, but it
could only result from a tremendous social catastrophe. One which would
be of sufficient depth to alter the entire relationship of forces which has
been built up as the result of the development of the modern Negro movement and
the creation of the CIO. Only once during the past 130 years have the Negro
masses intimated in any way that they might take the road of separatism. This
was the result of a social catastrophe: the defeat of the Negroes in the
Reconstruction.

This defeat pushed them back into such a terrible isolation and
demoralization, that there was no channel for the movement to express its
traditional demand for equality. The result was the Garvey movement. This
occurred, and could have occurred, only in the deepest isolation and confusion
of the Negro masses. The real meaning of the Garvey movement is that it
provided a transition from the abject defeat of the Negroes to the renewal of
their traditional struggle for direct equality. It did not at all signify a
fundamental nationalism.

Nevertheless, it is undeniable that there were sufficient elements
of genuine separatism in the Garvey movement to have taken it in a different
direction than it actually went, under different circumstances. Consequently,
it cannot be excluded, with a reappearance of similar conditions which brought
on the Garvey movement, under different historical circumstances, the
separatist tendency might become stronger and even dominant, and the historical
tendency of the struggle might change its direction. I would view it as a
potentially great revolutionary movement against capitalism and welcome and
support it as such. But no more revolutionary than the present
tendency toward direct assimilation.

It is important to note here the following comparison between the
Negro movement in the United States and the oppressed nations of Europe. The
Negro movement expresses separation at the time of its greatest backwardness,
defeat and isolation. The oppressed nations express separatism only under the
favorable conditions of revolution, solidarity and enlightenment.

We must now return to the specific circumstances which were
mentioned by Trotsky as being conducive to the possible development of Negro
separatism, to my interpretation of them, and to Comrade Breitmans
remarks about my interpretation.

First in regard to the Japanese invasion. Comrade
Breitman, a fairly literal-minded comrade himself, objects to my literal
interpretation of Trotskys reference to the possibility of a Japanese
invasion being a possible condition for the emergence of Negro separatism.

Now in the text (a rough stenogram uncorrected by the
participants) there is no interpretation of this proposition. At no other
place in either the published discussion or in any writing does Trotsky allude
to it again. We are left with the necessity of interpreting it as is most
logical and most consistent with the context in which it appears.

I am firmly persuaded that it is necessary to stick very closely
to a literal construction of what Trotsky said here in order to retain his
meaning, or at least that meaning which appears to me to be self-evident.

Trotsky said, If Japan invades the United States. He
did not say, If the United States embarks upon war with Japan. Or,
If the United States wars on China. As a matter of fact the U.S.
had a long war with the Japanese, an imperialist nation, and another long war
with the North Koreans, a revolutionary people. Neither of these wars created
any conditions which stimulated Negro separatism. But this wasnt what
Trotsky was talking about. He said, If Japan invades the United
States. And he must have meant just that. He didnt mean an attack
on the Hawaiian Islands, or the occupation of the Philippines, but an invasion
of the continental United States in which large or small areas of the U.S.
would come under the domination of an Asian imperialist power, which, however,
is classified by the United States as an inferior race.

Such a circumstance would cause a severe shock to the whole racial
structure of American society. And out of this shock might conceivably come
Negro separatism. For in the beginning of a Japanese occupation, it seems
highly probable that the Negroes would receive preferential treatment by the
Japanese, at least to the extent of being granted equality. But this would be
the equality of subjection to a foreign invader. The contradiction which this
kind of situation would put the Negro people in is the circumstance which
Trotsky saw as containing the possibility of developing Negro separatism.

Comrade Breitmans proposal that an invasion of China by the
U.S. might bring forth similar results is very wrong. If the Negro people began
to develop a reluctance to fight against China under the conditions of a
protracted war against China, they would not develop separatist tendencies.
They would combine with the more class conscious white workers who felt the
same way about it and develop a vital agitation leading the mass action of the
workers and all the oppressed against the war.

But it is significant that Comrade Breitman immediately postulated
Negro separatism as the most probable expression of their opposition to war.
This derives from his nationalist conception of the Negro question. If we could
agree that Trotskys analysis of the problem of nationalities in the
Russian revolution was the key to the understanding of the Negro question I
would be more sympathetic to Comrade Breitmans tendency to see Negro
separatism as the possible result of every minor change in the objective
conditions of the class struggle. As it is I cannot go along with it.

Next comes the question of fascism. And again, I am inclined to
rather literal construction of Trotskys statement, for the reason that it
is the only one which corresponds to the actual possibilities. Trotsky said
that if fascism should be victorious, a new condition would be created which
might bring about Negro racial separatism. He wasnt alluding to the
temporary victories which might appear during the course of a long struggle
against it. He specifically included a new and different national
condition in race relations: a new privileged condition for the
white workers at the expense of the Negroes, and the consequent alienation of
the Negro struggle from that of the working class as a whole.

I maintain that until the complete victory of fascism the basic
relation between the Negro struggle and the working class struggle will remain
unaltered and even in partial and episodic defeats will tend to grow stronger;
that there will be no groundwork for the erection of a fundamentally separatist
movement as long as the present basic relation between the Negro struggle end
the working class struggle remains as it is.

Comrade Breitman says on page 13, And in that case (an
extended struggle against fascism) may a fascist victory not be possible in the
southern states, resulting in an intensification of racial delirium and
oppression beyond anything yet known. And may this not bring about a
separatist development?

His contention obviously is that a victory of fascism in the South
would result in something qualitatively different than exists there today. But
what is at stake here is not the question of self-determination, but our
conception of the southern social system. Comrade Breitman obviously disagrees
with my analysis of the South or he could not possibly make such an assertion.

I have characterized the basic regime in the South since the end
of Reconstruction as fascist-like;i.e., herein is revealed
the sociological and historical antecedent of German fascism. Further, a
fascist-like regime which has now degenerated into a police dictatorship.

The present rulers of the South were raised to power by the Klan,
a middle class movement of racial terrorism. This movement was controlled not
by the middle class, but by the capitalist class and the plantation owners. It
achieved the elimination of both the Negro movement and the labor movement from
the South for an extended period of time. It was the result of a defeated and
aborted revolution. It crushed bourgeois democracy and eliminated the working
class and the small farmers from any participation in government. It resulted
in a totalitarian type regime. It resulted in a destruction of the living
standards of the masses of people, both white and black, both workers and
farmers.

Since the triumph of the Klan in the 1890s which signified
the triumph of a fascist-type regime, there has been no qualitative change in
political relations. As the mass middle class base of the Klan was dissipated
by the evolution of capitalism, the regime degenerated into a military
dictatorship, which is the condition of the South today.

It has been difficult to arrive at a precise and scientific
designation of the southern social system. When I say fascist-like
it not only implies identity but difference. There are the following
differences.

First, that the southern social system was established not in the
period of capitalist decline but in the period of capitalist rise. The most
important consequence of this difference has been that the middle class base of
southern fascism was able to achieve substantial benefits from their servitude
to the plantation owners and capitalists in their function as agents of the
oppression of the Negroes and the workers generally. The persecution of the
Jews by the German middle class got them nothing but their own degradation. As
capitalist decline sets in the South, the middle class base of the southern
system begins to lose its social weight and many of the benefits it originally
derived from the system.

Second, the southern system occurred in an agrarian economy,
whereas fascism in Europe was a phenomenon of the advanced industrial
countries. In the more backward agrarian countries of Europe and Asia, where
the peasantry is the main numerical force which threatens capitalism, it has
not been necessary to resort to the development of a fascist movement in order
to achieve counter-revolution. In the Balkan countries, a military
counter-revolution was sufficient to subdue the peasantry in the revolutionary
years following the Russian revolution.

The counter-revolution in the United States agrarian South during
the Reconstruction required the development of a fascist-like movement long
before its necessity was felt elsewhere. This was because chattel slaves are
more like modern proletarians than like peasants.

The weakness of the peasantry as a class has been their
petty-bourgeois character as tillers of small plots of soil to which they are
attached. This has dispersed them, and made it difficult and indeed impossible
for the peasantry to form a unified and homogeneous movement.

The chattel slave, the product of an ancient mode of production,
has no land, no property, no nothing. He differs from the modern wage slave
only in that he does not even have his own labor to sell for he doesnt
even own his body. In addition to this, unlike the peasantry, slaves are worked
in large numbers, and in the western hemisphere, under conditions of
large-scale commercial agriculture.

This proletarian quality of the slave has resulted in the creation
of movements of considerably greater homogeneity and vitality than were
possible for the peasantry of Europe. Capitalism was made aware of this in both
Haiti and in the U.S. Reconstruction.

The third difference between the southern system in the U.S. and
European fascism is that the southern system was a regional rather than a
national system. It was always surrounded by a more or less hostile social
environment within the framework of a single country. It did not have national
sovereignty. So even though the southern bourbons have held control of some of
the most important objects of state power in the United States for many decades
and have attempted to spread their social system nationally in every
conceivable manner, that they have not been successful has been a source of
constant pressure upon the whole social structure of the South. The great
advances which the Negro movement of the South has made of recent years occur
under conditions of the degeneration of the southern system. The limitations of
these same advances are, however, that the basic regime established by the Klan
remains intact.

A new fascist upsurge in the South would worsen the conditions of
the Negroes only in degree, not qualitatively. Comrade Breitmans
position is that there would be a qualitative difference. It seems to me that
it is necessary to cope with this question fundamentally, rather than
exclusively with its secondary manifestations.

There is another false conclusion inherent in Comrade
Breitmans series of assumptions. A victory of neo-fascism in the South
would have no fundamental effect upon the basic course of the Negro movement.
For although the Negro movement is not national in the sense that
Comrade Breitman refers to it, it is certainly national in scope; it is a
single homogeneous movement throughout the country.

This was true in 1830 and it is true today. In the era before the
Civil War, the movement of the slaves could take no open or legal character in
the South. The northern Negro movement was the open expression of the
slaves struggle. But it also provided the fundamental leadership and
program for the movement of the slaves.

A similar relation between the various geographical sections of
the Negro movement exists today. This relationship is modified, however, by the
fact that the specific weight of the Negro struggle outside the South is
greater than it was a century ago, by virtue of the large concentration of
Negroes in the northern and western cities.

6. The Question of the Independent Organization of Negroes

Comrade Breitman has asked me to express myself more clearly and
fully on the vital aspect of the Negro question relating to the
independent activities of the Negro movement.

Very well. I advocate the unqualified support of the independent
organizational expressions of the Negro struggle. I consider that the various
manifestations of the independent character of the Negro struggle represent an
absolutely essential arena of our work. This applies to the all--Negro
organizations, as well as others.

I have a different evaluation of the quality of the independent
Negro movement than does Comrade Breitman. I see the independence of the
movement as expressing the fundamental aspirations of the Negro people in a
contradictory manner; separate organization is the form in which the demand for
assimilation is found. This results from the contradictory character of race
relations in the U.S. White supremacy is created and maintained by the
independent and exclusive organization of whites. Negroes are, therefore,
forced into racial organization of their own in order to conduct a struggle
against the race system.

On this question of the independent character of the Negro
struggle Comrade Breitman is preoccupied with the form of the struggles. He
tends to confuse the question of independence of form with independence as a
direction of social motion. He implies constantly and even states that
byvirtue of independent form, its direction of motion may become
toward social independence.

Although he has reluctantly acknowledged that we must also deal
with something other than form, Comrade Breitmans complete preoccupation
with it has committed him to disregard all of the fundamental economic,
cultural, geographical, and historical factors, the difference in consciousness
and direction of motion, the difference in origin and development, all of which
set the Negro question apart from the national question in Europe. Because of
the one factor of independence of form of the struggle which bears a slight
similarity to the movements of oppressed nations of eastern Europe, the Negro
struggle is to him, therefore, national in character and will (or may) be
stimulated toward separatism by similar circumstances which produced the demand
for self-determination of the national minorities of Europe.

7. Self-Determination and the White Workers

One of the signs of the vanguard character of the Negro struggle
in its relation to the struggle of the working class against capitalism is the
greater class consciousness of Negro workers as compared to the white working
class.

This class consciousness derives from race consciousness and is
rooted in the very nature of the Negro question. One of the main factors which
prevents the development of class consciousness in the American working class
is race prejudice. Specifically: white chauvinism.

The division of American society into races cuts across the
working class. The white monopoly in skilled crafts created an aristocracy of
labor corresponding to the racial division of society in general. The working
class generally accepted the idea that they secure an economic advantage from
the subordinate position of Negroes in the working class.

But as the role of the skilled crafts diminishes in modern
industry, the possibility of maintaining an aristocratic division in the
working class is revealed as a weapon against the working class as a whole,
dividing it and preventing unified class action against capitalism.

Class consciousness and race prejudice do not mix. Rather one
excludes the other. It is only the revolutionary socialists and the Negroes who
are the implacable and conscious foes of race prejudice.

Segregation is the foundation of prejudice. The Negroes, in their
struggle against segregation are constantly clearing the ground for the
emergence of class consciousness in the working class as a whole.

It is the historical role of the Negro struggle to break down race
prejudice in the working class and thereby to lead white workers toward class
consciousness.

If the Negro struggle should change its course and strike out for
racial independence, it would deprive the working class of its most class
conscious, and advanced segments. Such a development would probably doom the
American working class to a long continuation of its present political
backwardness.

Under these conditions, Negro separatism would be reactionary and
we would fight it mercilessly along with the militant Negroes.

The movement for the 49th State was precisely such a reactionary
movement. It was promoted by middle class Negroes at the very time when Negro
workers were at last in a position to see the possibility of joint struggle
with the white workers against the employers in the great struggles of the
1930s. This movement was rightly condemned by the militant Negroes
associated with the working class movement and with the NAACP.

At the present moment, the rise to prominence of many Negro
segregated educational institutions is calculated to be a counterweight to the
struggle against segregation in the schools.

As the American working class reaches the very threshold of class
consciousness and is on the verge of overcoming race prejudice sufficiently to
take a fundamental step in consciously organizing itself as a class; at this
time there will unquestionably be a revival of Negro separatism. It will be a
last-ditch attempt on the part of the capitalist class to prevent working class
solidarity and we will fight it.

It is not difficult under present conditions to convince even
backward white workers of the idea of the right of Negroes to
self-determination. This is because it corresponds to their race prejudice. It
is precisely the backwardness of the white working class and the tradition of
segregation which make the idea of self-determination for the Negroes more
palatable and realistic to prejudiced white workers than the idea
of immediate and unconditional equality.

This factor is another reason that Negroes tend to be hostile to
the idea of their self-determination. It also reveals another important
distinction between the national question as expressed in the Russian
revolution and the race question in the U.S. In the struggle against Russian
capitalism, the slogan of self-determination for the oppressed minorities was
the key to the liberation of the Russian workers from Great Russian chauvinism.

But it is different with racial chauvinism. The foundation of
racial exploitation is not forced assimilation but segregation. White
chauvinism expresses essentially the ideology of segregation. By virtue of the
fact that segregation is part of the implied foundation of the idea of Negro
self-determination, it tends to confirm white workers in their chauvinistic
backwardness.

8. On the Nature of the Slogan of Self-Determination

The idea of self-determination of the oppressed minorities of
Europe has played a decisive role in the unfolding of the revolution there
since 1917. What is the actual content of this idea?

First of all, of and by itself, it decides nothing for an
oppressed minority except to open up the question of free choice in deciding
the fundamental questions. The economic and political development of Great
Russia required the subordination of petty states and principalities to the
national needs, as in the unification of France and Britain. But the belated
and uneven development of Russia combined the development of a single nation,
Great Russia, with its imperialist oppression of subject peoples.

This expression of uneven development was typical of eastern
Europe in general. And in many cases the pressure for assimilation into the
dominant nation was strong enough, and the national aspirations of the
oppressed minorities sufficiently subdued to inject an element of doubt as to
the fundamental historical mode of direction of these peoples.

The revolutionary party cannot appear before such oppressed
minorities as dictating to them that they must aspire to independence. By means
of the slogan of self-determination, the Bolsheviks invited the
oppressed minorities to undertake a struggle for national independence and
promised them support if they should so decide.

Therefore, the slogan for self-determination is a transitional
slogan; a transition to national consciousness.

What is to be determined? In the first place it is not one of two
things which are involved at this stage. It is not a matter of determining
either assimilation or independence. For an oppressed nation does not struggle
for assimilation. It merely ceases to be a nationality and assimilates. Such a
nation does not determine that it will do this, but is just absorbed into the
dominant nation.

The only thing to be determined is whether to undertake a struggle
for national independence.

The second phase of the question of self-determination occurs when
national consciousness is already established and a nation begins to emerge. In
the Russian revolution the oppressed nationalities established the conditions
of their future assimilation into the USSR under the Bolshevik principle of
self-determination. The question to be determined at this stage was whether the
formerly oppressed nations of Czarism should give up a portion of their
national sovereignty and federate into the USSR, or to assert complete
independence. Either of these choices is, of course, merely the condition by
which these people will eventually assimilate into world socialism which will
be without national boundary lines.

Among the colonial peoples the slogan of self-determination has
little if any meaning or application. Their struggles are from the beginning
far advanced in comparison to the small nations of Europe. They have already
determined not only that they are nations but also that they want and require
complete independence from the oppressing imperialist country.

Furthermore, the nationalism of most colonial peoples is not
generally questioned by the oppressor so long as it does not express the desire
for independence. Britain never attempted to assimilate the
Indians, as Russia did the Ukrainians. On the contrary the strictest division
between the European and native cultures was always maintained as a
necessary condition of the rule of the British.

The Chinese never felt the need for this kind of transitional
slogan to awaken their resentment of colonial oppression or their desire to be
independent of it.

Neither the Colonial Theses of the Second Congress of the
Comintern, nor the theses on the Far East of the First Congress of the Fourth
International give any indication that the question of self-determination plays
a role in the struggle of the colonial peoples against imperialism. Theirs is a
direct struggle for independence which doesnt require this transitional
vehicle. The strategic problem for the revolutionary party is considered to be
to create a class differentiation in the national struggle whereby the
proletariat may be able to give leadership to it.

9. The Negroes and the Question of Self-Determination

I have admitted a certain limited historical possibility in which
the Negro movement might take a separatist course. Such as after the complete
triumph of fascism in the U.S.

I believe that even under such circumstances the separatist
movement of Negroes would probably have the same function that the Garvey
movement had in its day: to provide a transition to the open struggle for
direct assimilation.

But even in this circumstance, the fundamental difficulty
reappears. For the slogan of self-determination was designed for the national
question in Europe, and the Negro question in the U.S. is different in kind.

If the necessities of the struggle against capitalism required the
Negroes to aspire or strive for racial separation it would probably be quite as
obvious as the desire for national independence of the colonial peoples. In
this case the slogan of self-determination would be just as meaningless as it
is today for both the colonial peoples and the Negroes in the U.S.

Negroes in the United States do not have national consciousness.
This is not because they are politically backward as the Stalinists claim and
as Comrade Breitman implies, but because there is no economic groundwork upon
which they might build a national consciousness.

They do, however, possess race consciousness. Race consciousness
is primarily the Negroes consciousness of equality and their
willingness to struggle for its vindication. This consciousness is the
political equivalent of the national consciousness of oppressed nations and of
the class consciousness of the working class. It is equivalent in that it
provides an adequate groundwork for the solution of the question of racial
discrimination.

Among the oppressed nations and classes of the world, both
national and class consciousness can be fulfilled in the present epoch only
through the socialist revolution. This is also true of Negro race
consciousness.

What is the problem of consciousness among Negroes? Some Negroes
are not conscious of their right to equality. They are victims of the pressure
of white supremacy and through the Booker T. Washington influence accept the
social status of inequality as right and proper. They must strive to be the
equivalent of whites by the standards of white supremacy.

The individual, left to his or her own resources must work out a
servile solution to his or her individual problem. The social objective which
is contained in this theory is the possibility of a separate but subordinate
society for Negroes modeled after the social system of the South.

This is another reason that Negroes react with hostility to the
program of Negro separatism: it is very well known to them as containing racial
subordination.

Our strategical problem is to overcome the absence of race
consciousness. Or, putting it another way: to find a transition to race
consciousness.

To propose to the mass of workers and Negroes the idea of
self-determination would be wrong. For the decisive fact in the acceptance of
white supremacy is the acceptance of segregation. The slogan of
self-determination requires the desire for segregation as its foundation.
Upon this foundation national consciousness is built.

In this manner the idea of self-determination cuts across the path
of our strategic problem because it encourages the acceptance of segregation;
and this is the case whether it is advanced as a slogan or merely held in
abeyance in our theoretical analysis.

Comrade Breitmans support of the idea of self-determination
estranges him from the Negro movement on two counts. First, in relation to the
mass of Negroes who have attained race consciousness. These Negroes are above
the level of consciousness which requires the kind of transition which is
represented in the slogan of self-determination. He proposes that the
revolution will (or may) return the Negroes to a stage of ignorance and
backwardness in which this elementary type of transitional slogan will
correspond with their lack of consciousness.

Second, this idea contributes nothing to the consciousness of the
more backward Negro es except to confirm their backwardness.

10. The Question of Method

The question of method has become involved in the discussion
primarily with Comrade Breitmans preoccupation with form.

There are several other aspects of his thinking which require
scrutiny from this point of view. The first of these is the tentative character
of all or most of his conclusions. This is illustrated by the astonishing
circumstance that some of his most important conclusions are contained in
parenthetical expressions.

This has been a considerable irritation to me in replying to him:
how difficult it is to break through a parenthesis to make a polemic! But in
reality this does him no discredit. For this is evidently his means of saying
that although he reacts with hostility to my point of view he is not prepared
to propose his own in as categorical a manner as I have mine.

He has thereby left important question marks over his own point of
view. I consider this a contribution to the tone of the discussion which will
help to prevent the crystallization of opinion before the discussion is in a
more advanced stage.

Nevertheless, I must call attention to these question marks. I
have advanced a fundamental proposition of the two poles of the Negro movement
being separatism and assimilation. There is nothing more fundamental to the
nature of the question than its internal polar opposition. Yet Comrade
Breitman, while he disagrees with my statement of this polar opposition, has
only this to say: (Such over-simplification would be unnecessary with
another conception, here advanced tentatively: ).

On page 12. We do not know the precise historical direction
the Negro movement will take. Now it is not up to us to determine in
advance all the tactical variants through which a movement must go in order to
fulfil its destiny. But ...the precise historical direction is the
one thing that we are supposed to know. As a matter of fact that is the one
thing which has given us the responsibility of the whole future of mankind:
that we know the precise historical direction of every social movement which
pertains to the international social revolution against capitalism, and the
political revolution against the Soviet bureaucracy. If we do not know what the
precise historical direction of motion of the Negro struggle is, it is high
time we found out, for that is our fundamental concern.

On page 19, he says, in the same vein, But if the Negro
masses, for whatever reason and despite our advice, should determine that they
cant get or dont want equality through integration... etc.
This particular question mark which Comrade Breitman puts over his own
convictions is part of his mystical attachment to Negro nationalism. For he
somehow knows that the Negro people will (possibly) demand a
separate state, but he cannot give any reason for it. Therefore he must include
in his program, But if the Negroes, for whatever reason want to
develop a separate society we should support them.

Yet another characteristic of Comrade Breitmans article is
argument by implication.

Take for instance his handling of the Garvey movement. I have
analyzed this movement on two separate occasions. Comrade Breitman apparently
disagrees with this analysis. He says that I dismiss the question too lightly
and am wrong in identifying Garvey with Booker T. Washington.

He doesnt like my analysis. But what is his? He doesnt
give any.

Now it is just possible that he believes that my argument and
analysis are completely vanquished by his few reproving words. That would
indicate that he doesnt consider it necessary to restate an argument
which is already conclusively proved. That is, he argues here by implication.
As elsewhere in the article, he relies upon traditional conceptions to argue
for him. But these are precisely the conceptions which I have challenged, and
very specifically, too.

It may be that there are others who, like Comrade Breitman
consider the traditional conception of questions to be sufficient evidence of
their correctness, by virtue of their traditional existence. But Comrade
Breitman sets himself the task of convincing me and the whole party of the
errors of my point of view. This requires more than an implied argument.

11. Self-Determination and Stalinism

I believe that I have referred before to the astonishing fact that
our resolution on the Negro question is probably unique in all the political
resolutions of the party in that it doesnt even mention Stalinism.

The Stalinists rank very high among our political enemies. They
are, at least, our most serious competitors for the allegiance of the radical
Negroes. Yet we have never published a criticism of their program for Negroes.

The only possible inference which could be drawn from this
circumstance is that we have no programmatic or theoretical criticism of the
Stalinists. Comrade Breitman justifies this inference in his proposition that
our difference with the Stalinists is a tactical and propaganda difference:
that they defend the right of the Negroes to self-determination in a vulgar and
bureaucratic manner.

Comrade Breitmans frivolous description, on page 16, of what
the Stalinist position on the Negro question is, does the Stalinists a great
injustice. For the groundwork of the Stalinist conception of the Negro question
is the nationalist conception of the Negro question. And this is Comrade
Breitmans fundamental ground.

The main difference between the position of Comrade Breitman and
that of the Stalinists is that where he is tentative, they are sure; where he
is vague, they are clear; where Comrade Breitman says that the Negroes
may develop separatist tendencies, the Stalinists say that the Negroes
will.

Comrade Breitman designates the Negroes as a nation, not directly,
but by his reference to the identity of the Negro struggle and the problem of
the non-classical nationalities of the Russian revolution. The
Stalinists say that the Negroes are a nation because they fulfil all of the
economic and cultural conditions which are the basis of nationalism.

Comrade Breitman suggests that I would be a poor one to clarify
and explain how our defense of the Negroes right to self-determination
differs from the Stalinists. And he is quite right. For I do not believe
that the question of self-determination is at stake in the Negro struggle. The
concept of self-determination is a reactionary idea which cuts across the
historical line of development of the struggle, confusing its nature, its aims
and objectives.

I have upon several occasions alluded to the hostility with which
many militant Negroes regard the theory of Negro self-determination. But it is
quite true that the Communist Party has a considerable Negro cadre, and upon
occasion this has been pointed out as a contradiction to my contention of the
attitude of Negroes toward the question of their self-determination.

This is, to be sure, a militant group of Negroes, and if they are
not devoted to the idea of self-determination, they are at least tolerant of it
to the extent that they are willing to live in a party which holds this idea in
theoretical abeyance.

But the idea of self-determination for Negroes in the U.S. is no
more fantastic than the theory of socialism in one country and all the
political fantasies which flow from it. When a person of any race or
nationality whatever, becomes so corrupted in thinking as to be able to accept
the fundamental political line of Stalinism, it should not be too hard to
accept the idea of self-determination for American Negroes, even as expounded
by the Stalinists.

There is another side to the problem of Stalinism. The Stalinist
party goes through a regular cyclical crisis over the question of race
prejudice. Periods of theoretical reaffirmation of the theory of Negro
self-determination alternate with purges and campaigns against white
chauvinism.

This hectic internal life around the race question, is caused
primarily by the fact that the basic theory of the Stalinists on the Negro
struggle does nothing to liberate white workers from prejudice, but on the
other hand corresponds to their backwardness and tends to confirm them in it.

Our criticism of Stalinism must be a fundamental one. For I
conceive it to be our task as far as theory is concerned to vindicate in every
conceivable manner and in all phases, the Negro struggle for equality. The
confusion of the Negro question with the national question in Europe and the
colonial question serves only to obscure the real nature of this struggle and
constitutes a qualification, or limitation to the validity of the real Negro
struggle.

Summary

1. The Negro question in the United States is not a national
[one], but is the question of racial discrimination.

2. I disagree with the proposition that the study of the national
question in the Russian revolution gives specific illumination to the Negro
question in the United States, except in that it reveals a qualitative
difference between them.

3. Essentially, only the complete victory of fascism in the U.S.
could transform the movement for direct assimilation through immediate equality
into one of racial independence.

4. The dual nature of the Negro struggle arises from the fact that
a whole people regardless of class distinction are the victims of
discrimination. This problem of a whole people can be solved only through the
proletarian revolution, under the leadership of the working class. The Negro
struggle is therefore not the same as the class struggle, but in its
independent character is allied to the working class. Because of the
independent form of the Negro movement, it does not thereby become a national
or separatist struggle, but draws its laws of development from its character as
a racial struggle against segregation and discrimination.

5. The question of self-determination is not the question which is
at stake in the Negro struggle.We have in our resolution and in the party
consciousness on the Negro question, as expressed by Comrade Breitman, a
conception of Negro nationalism and the importance of the idea of Negro
self-determination. I believe that this should be combated and eliminated.
First, because it is dialectically incorrect. Second, because most Negroes are
hostile to it on a completely progressive basis. Third, because it teaches
white workers nothing but tends to confirm them in their traditional race
prejudice.

In conclusion, I wish to thank Comrade Breitman for his reply,
which in its own way was straight-forward and more revealing than I had
anticipated. I hope that he will not consider that it has revealed more to me
than is justified by its content or by direct implication.